


0814

by grayspider



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies), Spider-Man - All Media Types, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, BAMF Natasha Romanov, Civil War Fix-It, Gen, Heavy Angst, Human Experimentation, Hurt Peter Parker, Hurt/Comfort, Hydra (Marvel), Hydra Peter Parker, Kidnapped Peter Parker, Kidnapping, Minor Character Death, Natasha Romanov Is a Good Bro, Oscorp - Freeform, Peter Parker Needs a Hug, Poor Peter Parker, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Pre-Spider-Man: Homecoming, Precious Peter Parker, Protective Tony Stark, Tony Stark Acting as Peter Parker's Parental Figure, Tony Stark Has A Heart, Tony Stark-centric, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-25
Updated: 2020-04-25
Packaged: 2021-03-01 21:48:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 19,357
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23834137
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grayspider/pseuds/grayspider
Summary: “Open it,” Natasha says. She’s now standing opposite of Tony and Steve, her arms crossed over her chest as she stares at the hologram in anticipation. The video plays without a beat of hesitation. It’s footage from a security camera poised at the top corner of a room. Tony immediately recognizes it as the bland, white solitary room from the first video, but instead of three masked men in white, there’s a figure sitting upright in the bed. Despite the low quality, Tony can immediately tell its a young boy, no older than 16 years old, sitting on the bed with his head hung low and hands tangled in the sheets pooled in his lap. He can only see the side of the kid’s face which is completely covered by a mess of curly, matted brown hair.As the video carries on, the boy doesn’t move. He sits still in that bed like a statue, so still that Tony thinks for a moment that it’s a freeze-frame rather than a clip. A heavy feeling settles into his gut. He should’ve listened. “A child,” he says, somehow standing angry, confused, and dumbfounded all at once.
Relationships: Pepper Potts/Tony Stark
Comments: 25
Kudos: 562
Collections: The Friendly Neighborhood Exchange





	0814

**Author's Note:**

  * For [WriterReadsStuff](https://archiveofourown.org/users/WriterReadsStuff/gifts).



> This is a gift for KaitlynReadsStuff for the Friendly Neighborhood Fic Exchange following this prompt:  
> \-- Hydra! Peter getting close to Tony
> 
> Hello! I hope you enjoy this story, but first I want to include some possible warnings for this story.  
> Tw: mild swearing and language, non-graphic discussion of human experimentation (HYDRA SUCKS), kidnapping, and minor character death.

All he feels for that brief, fleeting moment of consciousness is pain. That’s all he knows now: pain. It’s not always the same type of pain. Sometimes it’s sharp and it takes his breath away as needles dig into his skin. Sometimes it’s dull and throbbing, the waves of agony rolling on him in waves, worsening with each breath he takes. Sometimes it’s so bright and blinding that all he sees for hours is white. He can sometimes feel his teeth crack as he bites down on a thick, rough object wedged between his lips. Whenever he’s awake, it’s just pain. He vaguely remembers a time where the pain wasn’t a constant. He remembers warmth in the form of a golden smile and a warm embrace, but each time the faceless men with white coats visit him, he remembers less and less of that warmth. It grows colder with each passing minute. 

“We’ll need another round of Benzos,” a voice says. It’s a voice he recognizes as one of the faceless men. But as he cries out in agony, teeth and jaw clenched, body rigid, he’s not sure which one it is. “We can’t keep working with the Паук squirming.”

He hears a sickening  _ crack _ , and another sharp wave of agony strikes through his side. It takes his breath away; he’s gasping against the cold, metal slab beneath his bareback. It’s so cold. He’s always been so cold. 

“Boss, the mutation has severely altered… his body burns right through…” The words are lost to him in his pained haze. He tries  _ so hard  _ to latch onto each word. It’s impossible, it’s always been impossible. He feels a prick and an insufferable burning in his arm before a familiar heaviness seeps into his bones. It spreads through his body like water, and with each passing second, the excruciating pain dulls into a constant buzz in the background. In only these moments, he finds rest. 

“So Hydra has another little base doing their lame science experiments,” Tony says as he faces Steve, arms crossed against his chest. “What’s that got to do with us right now, Rogers? I’ve got a gala to attend, and you know, I’ve really got to put more thought into what I’m going to wear. The red satin is really calling my name, but Pepper thinks that sapphire-”

“Tony, focus for one  _ second _ please?” Steve says with his arms crossed against his chest. He’s staring at Tony with as much disappointment as he is sure Rogers can muster. It’s impressive, really. “We’ve made good progress destroying major Hydra bases. All that is left are the smaller, sister locations. That doesn’t mean that they aren’t equally as dangerous.” 

“Can you even  _ uncross _ your arms, Rogers? Like, is it even physically possible?” Tony asks, tilting his head as he looks at the Captain. It’s not that he’s totally against the raging excitement of taking down a useless little Hydra base. The suit was itching for a run-in with some bad guys, but he really  _ did _ need to attend this party. Not for himself, really, but Pepper would have his head on a silver platter if he didn’t at least pull through with  _ one _ Stark Industries event this year. “Why do you need me? I mean, I’m flattered to know you have such a big crush on me. But I’m sure it’s nothing you and Romanov can’t do yourselves.”

“Usually you’re the one talking us into doing stupid things.” Natasha quips from her place across the room, although her voice is too weary to seem teasing. She stands against the kitchen counter, arms braced against the granite behind her. “C’mon, you’re too lazy to show us up?”

“Not lazy,” Tony insisted. “Just self-concerned. I, for one, don’t see anything wrong with that.” Again, he’s self-concerned because he  _ knows _ that if he misses this gala that Pepper will  _ have his head _ . But he thinks that Steve and Natasha don’t need to know anything about that. His fear of his girlfriend should be kept entirely to himself. Otherwise, he’s sure Rogers will use it against him. 

“Tony,” Natasha huffs, stepping forward from her place by the kitchen counter. “You know it’s serious if  _ I’m _ asking  _ you _ for help.” The corner of her mouth tilts up in a half-smirk. She kept walking until she stood in front of Tony, arms crossed. She looks up at him, expression shifting into something more jaded. “It’s Oscorp. We think they’re making mutants, like the twins.”

Her words give Tony pause. It’s been a while since he’s heard any wind of the rotten Osborn and his company. It wasn’t long ago that the bastard horrifically failed at his attempts at using cross-species DNA mutation to solve medical crises across the globe. Tony’s fairly certain that that fiasco ended with him imprisoning a very scaly, slimy Dr. Curt Connors in the Raft. However, that was over three years ago, and Norman Osborne managed to cover it all up and the world would be none the wiser to the mad science hidden in Oscorp’s walls. Really, Tony hates the building more than anything. A tall, slate black skyscraper in the middle of Manhattan? It’s tactless and ugly if Tony has anything to say about it. At least Avengers Tower has some character to it. Now they’re involved with Hydra of all people? 

Tony’s sure his luck is just rotten at this point. Hydra and Oscorp in one day? It’s like the universe is screaming for his overinflated ego to get involved and rub their sorry faces into the dirt just one more time. “The last thing we need after Sokovia is more mutants running around,” he says. “I’ll bite. You get in there, free a bunch of mutants? What’s your plan there, Spangled?”

Steve breathes a deep sigh. He moves from where he stands near the doorway towards Natasha and Tony. Tony still thinks he looks a bit constipated. “On our last raid in Oslo, we found… files in their databases. I think they’ve been drawing our attention to these bigger outposts to distract us from something bigger going on.” He pulls a thumb drive from his back pocket, holding it up between two fingers to show Tony. “We think Oscorp is involved in this smaller base, but we need  _ you _ to look at these and tell us where and  _ who _ they come from.” 

Natasha stares up at him, face like a stone. “We wouldn’t come if it wasn’t serious, Tony. This is bad.”

Tony presses his mouth into a line. “Gotta admit, Stripes, didn’t think you knew how to work a flash drive.” He extends his hand out as an invitation. “Give it here. If we’re going in, I better know that it’s actually worth it.” 

Steve tosses him the flash drive, and Tony turns it over in his fingers. He doesn’t waste a second spinning his chair around to face his laptop. He pushes his glasses up further on the bridge of his nose as he plugs it into the side. “Got some data coming in, Fri,” he says. Before he can finish the sentence, virtual files unfold themselves on his laptop screen, extending out into holograms across the desk and through his glasses lenses. There are thousands of files, each titled with an encrypted code that Tony can’t decipher at first glance. 

“There are 14,657 files stored on this drive, sir,” FRIDAY speaks across the speakers. Natasha and Steve move in closer, their eyes glued to the broad spread of undecipherable data and folders across the table. “Where would you like to begin?”

“Scan all the files,” Tony says. “See if you can grab anyone’s faces from any of this and run it through the database.” 

“On it, boss.” The display of holographic files starts to turn and flip, each image and document from every folder folding out like a deck of cards. FRIDAY moves quickly, unraveling each folder and zip file until only a few images are pulled up on his screen. The first shows a group of three men standing in a room. To Tony, it seems like nothing more than a slightly glorified solitary confinement cell. Even the cells at the Raft rivaled this tiny space. But what stands out most to him is the three men. They wear large, white medical masks that obscure most of their faces. All he can see are dark, steely eyes staring back at him through the camera. “Play it back for me, FRIDAY.”

White noise fills the room as the video starts. The man in the middle- the tallest of the three- steps forward and looks down at his clipboard before he speaks. “TS 08-14,” he reads. “Day 15 of Prototype testing, beginning now.” The clip ends there, leaving the three of them in a moment of stunned silence. Tony notices a timestamp in the bottom left corner of the video: January 4th. Two weeks ago. 

Without comment, Tony swipes away the previous recording and selects the last photo. It’s a frame from what seems to be a security camera -- a man in a suit stands in an empty hallway with a phone pressed to his ear and a lab coat draped over his arm. Tony grabs the corners of the image, stands, and enlarges it over the whole table. “I’ll be damned. Osborn, the son of a bitch.” 

“His name and Oscrop were all over the files in the base in Oslo,” Natasha says. Her eyes move to Tony’s as they both look away from the projection. 

“And if he’s getting involved with Hydra, it means he’s up to no good,” Tony muses aloud. He knows Norman Osborn, unfortunately, and as hard as it is to admit, he’s not that different from Tony himself. He seems to have a few more screws loose than himself, but Osborn has always been the man to go beyond the limits for his  _ science _ . Tony knows his limits. He knows when he needs to stop. When his work is no longer used for good. He doesn’t think Norman Osborn has this same capability. The man has proved himself time and time again to be unhinged. “Wouldn’t be surprised if…” Tony pauses for a moment. He’s got an idea as to what Osborn could be up to.

Steve moves to Tony’s right, placing a hand on his shoulder. He tries to catch Tony’s eye, but he’s too deep in thought. “Tony, what is it?”

Tony shakes Steve’s hand off of his shoulder. “FRIDAY, do a deep dive. Search for anything with the words cross-species or hybrid.” If Osborn felt the need to team with Hydra, then that meant he needed help with something. Something he’s failed at before in the past. 

“He’s trying again?” Natasha balks. “After what happened with Connors?”

“Isn’t insanity doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results? Einstein said that, right?” Steve ponders, moving to the opposite side of the table to try to see what FRIDAY is unraveling. Several files pop up across the screen, all with different encrypted labels and dates ranging from August 2014 to three days ago. 

“That’s actually a myth. Einstein never said that,” Tony teases. “As much as I think Osborn is a nutcase, I’d chalk this up to Hydra having the resources that Osborn doesn’t. I just don’t know why.”

Tony opens the most recent document, dated just a few days before the video that he watched. When it opens, it looks like some kind of medical lab report. The top left corner reads TS #08-14, and below it are several charts like electrolyte levels, a complete blood count, cholesterol levels, and pages upon pages of EEG charts. He scrolls through, unsure of how to interpret the overwhelming amount of medical information and jargon. At the very bottom, there’s a handwritten note. 

_ TS #08-14 exhibits adequate progress in Prototype testing. The patient is alert and disoriented to time and place. The patient is tachycardic and hypertensive but is now easily subdued with enhanced tranquilizers. The patient presents with no memory. Receptive to Electroconvulsive Therapy, plan to continue with this treatment as indicated. The projection for 08-14 deployment on track. Cross-species mutation and enhancement considered successful for the first trial. _

“That’s what they did to Bucky,” Steve mutters under his breath, starting at the report with a mixture of horror and confusion. “The  _ therapy _ \-- it’s how they completely wiped his memory.”

Tony scrolls through all of the documents then, trying to ignore the nagging feeling in the back of his mind that something is  _ really _ wrong. Each document he skims through only solidifies this feeling in his gut until its crawling up the back of his throat like bile. Osborn and his disgusting ambition somehow found a way to justify  _ human experimentation _ for his cross-species bullshit. And it all seems centered on this TS 08-14 individual. 

“There’s a video attached to this file, boss. Would you like to open it?” FRIDAY asks, breaking the silence. 

Tony goes silent for a moment. He’s not sure he  _ wants _ to see it. A gross, selfish part of him wants to stuff this in a drawer, eat a nice dinner with Pepper, and go to this stupid gala. But he knows he can’t. He hates to admit, but Natasha and Steve are right. He was sure that they had eradicated whatever human-experimentation whackjobs were left in the fragmented Hydra structure, but he was wrong, and now someone is in danger.

“Open it,” Natasha says. She’s now standing opposite of Tony and Steve, her arms crossed over her chest as she stares at the hologram in anticipation. The video plays without a beat of hesitation. It’s footage from a security camera poised at the top corner of a room. Tony immediately recognizes it as the bland, white solitary room from the first video, but instead of three masked men in white, there’s a figure sitting upright in the bed. Despite the low quality, Tony can immediately tell its a young boy, no older than 16 years old, sitting on the bed with his head hung low and hands tangled in the sheets pooled in his lap. He can only see the side of the kid’s face which is completely covered by a mess of curly, matted brown hair.

As the video carries on, the boy doesn’t move. He sits still in that bed like a statue, so still that Tony thinks for a moment that it’s a freeze-frame rather than a clip. A heavy feeling settles into his gut. He should’ve  _ listened. _ “A child,” he says, somehow standing angry, confused, and dumbfounded all at once. 

“Yes,” Natasha replies, her face stone-cold and her mouth set in a thin line. There’s no hint of emotion on her face. Her gaze flicks over to meet Tony’s, something determined and stern there, before turning on her heel and walking towards the exit. 

She pauses for a moment as she reaches the door, tilting her head ever so slightly to the side. “We’re leaving tomorrow,” she calls coldly, before walking out of the room.

“What is your name?” 

He forgets his name. It’s somewhere deep inside his head, but it hurts too much that he can’t be bothered to search for it. That’s how they start each day, asking him his name. He used to answer it with his own-- that much he remembers-- but the sound of his own name is foreign to him now and he  _ forgets _ . They seemed pleased now that he forgets his name, but he also forgets his  _ new _ name, which makes the faceless men angry. 

He doesn’t respond this time when they ask him. They want him to answer a specific way, and they’ll hurt him if he doesn’t. But something in him tells him that it’s  _ wrong _ \-- that he shouldn’t say what they want them to, because it isn’t true. At least, he thinks it isn’t true. 

“I said, what is your  _ name _ ?” They seem angrier than before. He doesn’t look at them, his eyes glued to the surface of the shiny table he’s sitting at. He can almost see his reflection in the stainless-steel. They’re going to hurt him. If he doesn’t answer, that means he’s not ready yet and they’ll put the thick, metal band around his head again. They’ll strap him down into that chair and all he will feel is pain. Every hair on his body stands up, and he feels the fear creep under his skin, crawling like an army of insects and  _ screaming  _ for him to get out.  _ Danger,  _ his body cries out, but he can’t answer it, chained down to the table by his wrists and ankles. 

“I… it’s,” he tries. The words are falling flat on his tongue, and despite the desperation nestled in his chest, he cannot say the words. He hears the faceless man’s deep sigh of disappointment. The boy curls his fingers around the arms of the chair and the metal crumples underneath his touch. The sharp edges of the bent alloy slicing into his palm and pads of his fingers. The pain is dull, and he almost welcomes it as a disruption to the dull white noise constantly buzzing in his head. 

“Паук,” the faceless man says. His voice is cold and unforgiving when he speaks. “You’re a Паук designed to  _ obey _ . Won’t you obey, boy?” 

The boy suffocates in his silence. He’s biting at his tongue, too afraid to speak. They’re going to hurt him again. He’s failed-- he is only meant to obey. He can’t even obey. He hears the man to the left stand, moving around the table to stand at the boy’s side. He snaps his neck around, unable to ignore the scream of terror his senses give as the man draws close. There’s a prick in the side of his neck, and the world turns on its axis. He registers hands grabbing him from all sides, a thick copper ring clasped around his neck as he’s forced into a new chair.

He can’t see or hear. The world passes by in twisted, colorless blurs, but he knows where he is based on the cold plunge of dread barrelling through his stomach. There’s something locked onto his head, and he can feel the whirring of the machine staring vibrate throughout his entire body. “Please, no,” he whispers, though he can’t hear the sound of his own voice over the roaring of blood in his ears and the sharp ringing that’s screaming at him to  _ RUN _ . 

The haze clears just enough to hear the faceless man’s final request. “I’ll ask you one last time.” His voice is dripping with venom that causes his blood to run cold. “What is your name?”

The only thing he can manage is a pitiful whimper. The fear is so debilitating that he can’t move, he can’t breathe. He can’t do anything but suck in strangled breaths through his trembling lips, strain his wrists against whatever cold restraints, and wait for the pain to come.

When Tony meets with Steve and Natasha that next morning, he is not well-rested. Not that sleeplessness is new-- he’s gone several nights in a row with 30 minutes of sleep and sixteen cups of caffeine-- but it’s been the first time in months that something other than his own trauma and self-destructive behavior kept him awake. He spent the majority of the night standing in his lab, the Hydra files pulled up and organized across the entire room. He managed to make some resemblance of a timeline. There was no evidence of this base even existing before August 2014, when the first documentation of TS #08-14, who he assumes is the kid in the security footage, was created. Since then, there have been weekly reports, updates, and test results for subject TS #08-14 up until a few days ago, January 15, 2016. 

He tried running pieces of the kid’s face through any type of database or scanner that he could to no avail. Nothing from foster care or missing person cases from all over the country. It was as if the kid never went missing, or as if he didn’t even exist to begin with. There was absolutely no paper trail that Tony could find to link this kid in the video to anything or anyone across the globe. It kept him up for hours, as did the files he couldn’t access with the encryption codes embedded into them. Typically, Tony could decrypt codes like these in his sleep. However, he wasn’t sure if its the sleep deprivation or if maybe for once in his sorry life Osborn has actually outsmarted him, he can’t get them to budge. 

His night is also ruined by the very difficult conversation he has with Pepper when he, yet again, has to bail on another Stark Industries gala. He knows that she understands, deep down, but the feeling of disappointing her is one of the worst things he thinks he can feel. Well, other than the knowledge that there’s a kid in an underground hydra base and he almost completely abandoned him for a gala he didn’t want to go to in the first place.

So he prepares to raid the base with heavy, dark bags beneath his eyes and his nerves buzzing. He prepares his newest suit-- the Mark 46-- as Captain Rogers straps his shield to his arm and Natasha waits for them by the car. She seems just as pissed and impatient as she did yesterday. He can’t blame her now. He can be insufferable, he knows, but he’s ready to help them bust down the last of these Hydra bases, and hopefully, that will be the end to both them and the madman Osborn. 

“I trust you’ll get us into Oscorp without an issue,” Natasha says as Rogers walks over to meet her by the car. She prepares to get into the driver seat, securing the gun at her waistband as she watches the rest of the Iron Man suit close around Tony. “We’ll meet you there.” 

Tony watches as the two climb into the car, taking off towards midtown. For now, Tony has a slightly less low-key job he has to do. He should’ve guessed that Osborn was too far up his own ass to base his secret experiments anywhere other than the Oscorp building itself. He wishes that maybe the mission will go just a  _ little bit  _ wrong, that way he could erase that hideous building from New York’s skyline. It’s a wishful thought, but no, the priority is to bust these assholes and make sure that Hydra  _ and _ Oscorp won’t crawl out from the remains like a cockroach. Best case scenario, they’ll be able to release whatever sorry souls are trapped in there, and then that will be  _ it.  _ He’ll make it up to Pepper, throw a whole fundraiser in her name, end world hunger, and all that shit. He’s just got to take care of this first.

He takes flight, FRIDAY’s HUD directing him towards Midtown. It isn’t long before the towering, black building enters his sight, giant silver letters spelling  _ OSCORP _ vertically across the side. Tacky. Tony thinks that Osborn really needs to hire a new architecture, but he, unfortunately, won’t have the opportunity once he’s thrown into jail. Hell, maybe he’ll share a cell with his best buddy Dr. Curt Connors, Tony jokes to himself. 

“Arriving at Oscorp Industries at 200 feet,” FRIDAY tells him as he approaches the building. Tony takes a nose dive into the busy streets of Midtown. Taking the front door wasn’t really his style, but Rogers insisted that crashing through the top stories of the lab was gratuitous. He wasn’t wrong, but that doesn’t mean Tony isn’t bitter about it.

He lands on the sidewalk directly in front of Oscorp’s revolving front doors, the pavement beneath his iron-clad boots cracking from the force. He wastes no time peeling the suit from him, the iron and machinery folding down again and again until it sat in his hand in the form of a briefcase. It’s a new addition he managed to whip up last night during his long, sleepless hours in his lab. He holds the briefcase in his left hand, reaching up to fix the collar of his shirt before he steps inside. 

There are people staring as he enters Oscorp’s lobby. A group of what looks like high school students stand to the far right, tucked against the back of the wall beneath a giant screen with the newest Oscorp project statement playing on a loop. They’re no longer paying attention to their teacher, their heads turned around like owls to stare at  _ Tony Stark _ as he strolls through the front doors of Oscorp Industries. Tony hopes there are no paparazzi or press around. The last thing he wants is for a picture of him standing anywhere near Oscorp to exist. He shudders at the thought of it.

He walks to the desk, the frail-looking woman sitting behind it staring at him with disbelief when he clears his throat to get her attention. “Mr. Stark,” she fumbles, standing up behind her desk and reaching up to push her glasses further up her face. “What are-- How can I help you?”

“I’m here to see Norman,” he says. He leans against the desk, his elbow braced on the marble as he bears forward to look at the elderly receptionist. He glances down at her nametag. “ _ Linda _ , dear. If I could just slip past you here.”

The woman, Linda, starts clicking at her keyboard, squinting between Tony and her computer screen in confusion.  _ Obviously _ , he actually has no scheduled meeting with Osborn. He’d rather be caught dead than in that man’s conference room. “I’m sorry but I don’t see any such meeting on Mr. Osborn’s schedule,” she stammers.

“Ah, well you see it was more of a last-minute arrangement,” Tony says, rubbing at his brow with his free hand. Linda reaches a hand towards her earpiece as if moving to make a call, and Tony sucks in a sharp breath. “Best not to call him, I know how precious Norman’s time really is.” 

“I’m sorry, Mr. Stark, but I really can’t just let you in without authorization. I’m sure Mr. Osborn wouldn’t mind me calling.” Before Tony can come up with another excuse, her hand is on her ear, and Tony can hear the muffled dial tone through the phone.

He sighs in faux defeat, twisting around to take a glance over the entire lobby. With his back facing Linda, he clears his throat, reaching a hand up to fix the position of his glasses on the bridge of his nose. “Intercept that call would you, FRI?” 

“On it.” He turns back to find Linda speaking to someone on the other side. She can’t seem to get a word in edgewise, and Tony holds his breath. If Norman catches wind that  _ Tony Stark _ is here to see them, it will bust their plan wide open before it even has a chance to begin. He picks at the cuffs of his shirt as he waits, trying to mask his nerves as Linda speaks a hushed goodbye and taps on her earpiece once more.

All suspicion she seems to hold against Tony falls away. “I just spoke to Mr. Osborn’s assistant,” she says, plastering a large grin across her wrinkled face. Tony smiles back at her, trying not to look as pained as he feels. Linda opens a drawer beneath her desk, pulling out a guest pass and handing it to Tony. He tries not to feel offended. A  _ guest pass? _ For Iron Man? “You can go ahead, I’m sure you know where Mr. Osborn’s office is. I’m sorry for the trouble, sir.”

“No trouble, dear,” he says with a wink. He tightens his grip around his briefcase, taking the guest pass and clipping it to the front of his shirt with poorly-hidden disgust. He wastes no time headed towards the entrance gate to the left of the receptionist’s desk. He steps up to the large, slate elevators, pressing the down button. He glances over his shoulder; no one seems to be too keyed on his presence now that he’s left the lobby. Now the only people that pass him by are business officials with their heads shoved too far up their Bluetooth headsets to notice him. The elevator arrives in a beat, and he steps in, spamming the  _ close door _ button. They slide shut. There are three buttons beneath the lobby floor, and Tony presses the last one, but the elevator beeps at him. He furrows his brow and notices the fingerprint scanner beneath the last button. As idiotic as Osborn was, he at least knew how to protect his darkest secrets. 

“FRIDAY. Let’s get into the mainframe, see if we can’t persuade this bad boy to go down.” He rests the suitcase at his feet, turning his head to see the tiny lens of a security camera embedded into the steel ceiling of the elevator. “And let’s knock out that camera while we’re at it.”

Tony watches as code dances across his glasses lenses, and he searches for the override key that he knows Osborn is too idiotic to hide from his mainframe. It’s as easy to hack into the central system as it was back when he put Dr. Curt Connors away, just with some more firewalls. It’s child's play compared to what Tony is dealing with. It makes him wonder even more why Hydra, a top-secret organization that has been working in secret for decades, would work with Norman Osborn, the most moronic genius Tony has ever had the displeasure of meeting.

As the last piece of code flies across his lenses, he instructs FRIDAY to push past this last firewall, implementing his own little invisible virus to disable their algorithms. “And we’re in business,” he says as he presses on the bottom floor button once more. The button lights up, the fingerprint scanner fizzling out until only a black screen remains. 

“Security camera disabled, boss,” FRIDAY informs as the graphics on his HUD disappear as quickly as they came. Tony smiles with satisfaction, picking up his briefcase once more as the elevator starts its descent. 

  
At the bottom floor, the doors slide open and Tony is met with what looks like a glorified storage room. Thick, metal containers line the walls on all sides with numbered locking panels on the sides. He looks at them warily as he walks through the narrow hallway, approaching the doorway at the end. The next room is just another hallway void of the shipping containers. There are two doors on either side of him with labels in silver plating across their metal surface. They seem mundane enough: a boiler room and crypto-storage. He moves towards crypto-storage first, checking over his shoulder before approaching the door. There’s what appears to be an iris-scan lock on the door, which FRIDAY makes quick work of. Within a second, Tony’s shoving the door open. 

  
The room is freezing; Tony can instantly see his breath the moment he steps into the room. A soft, emerald glow basks the room, the light illuminating from clear glass containers taking up every inch of the room. In one glass case, there’s what Tony thinks is an ant farm, but the ants are alarmingly large. They’re frozen in place as if time had stopped in the middle of them constructing their home. The sight is unsettling. Tony swallows a lump forming in his throat.

At the back of the room, there’s a large display that takes up the entire back wall. There are multiple subdivisions in the class case-- at least 15 of them-- each filled with a singular branch, and…. spider-webs? He struggles to hold down a shiver of disgust. Spiders aren’t the most loveable creatures, he thinks, biting his lower lip. He approaches the cases and sees a singular spider occupying each box. He first stares at one in the center-- its body is bright blue and about as large as Tony’s palm. Its legs are long, thick, and black as night. It’s frozen as well, stuck in a place where it was sitting perched on the slender branch. Tony notices half-eaten flies and crickets littering the bottom of the case. He steps to the side, looking to the next spider. But the case is empty, to his surprise. In fact, it’s the only case out of all 15 that is empty.

There’s a label on this case. It’s a series of numbers that Tony isn’t sure how to decipher, but he sees a few numbers that strike him as familiar--  _ 0814 _ \-- and beneath the numbers is a singular word:  _ dead.  _ He’s not sure what it means, but despite his curiosity, he knows he can’t stand around and try to figure it out. He can’t waste precious time exploring Osborn’s dirty secrets. Well, he  _ is _ exploring his dirty secrets, just not these ones. He’s got human experimentation and torture beneath his feet that he needs to figure out first. If he has time before his dinner reservation with Pepper, he’ll come back to solve the mystery of the missing spider. 

“Can’t waste any more time, FRIDAY,” he whispers. “Can you see anything beneath me? Any secret lairs I should know about?” His glasses burst to life and he can see holographic outlines of structured beams and tunnels beneath him.  _ Bingo _ . 

“There seems to be an extensive structure beneath this boiler room. It extends at least two miles deep,” FRIDAY reports. A red line travels across the holographic floor plan, leading him out of the crypto-storage room and across the hall. “There’s an entrance in this room. I can see what seems to be an elevator shaft leading down into the basement.”

“How convenient for me,” he remarks with a triumphant smirk. He turns his heel, leaving the creepy spider cemetery behind as he leaves the storage room, shoving the door shut behind him. He heads straight for the boiler room, the eye-scanner already short-circuiting before he even has time to reach the door. 

In the boiler room, he finds what appears to be a trap door. It’s hidden behind the large furnace on the left side of the room, practically camouflaged against the ground. If Tony hadn’t asked FRIDAY to scan the room, he would’ve easily missed it. It has an old, snake-like symbol stamped into the metal. He can’t see any retina scanner, fingerprint sensor, or even a simple keypad keeping the hatch locked. It’s odd, he thinks, that Osborn would leave such a secretive entrance without any technological protection. He kneels down, curling his fingers beneath the lip of the door. He pulls on it with all of his strength, but it doesn’t remotely budge. This will likely be a problem best solved with Rogers’ super-strength. Or maybe a blast from his propulsors. He’ll try Rogers first. 

He taps into the comms channel through FRIDAY’s HUD. “Romanov. Rogers. You copy?”

He hears Steve respond through FRIDAY’s specs. “Loud and clear,” he says. “We’re a minute out. What have you found?” 

“Our golden ticket,” Tony says. “There’s a trap door beneath the building in this boiler room. The structure extends a few miles down. If it’s anywhere, it’s here, but I need some help cracking it open.”

“Copy that,” Natasha responds. “We’re approaching Oscorp on the east side. Find us a way in.” 

After nearly ten minutes of searching, he finally finds a back door emptying out into an abandoned alleyway. Romanov and Rogers announce their presence through his earpiece, and by the time he opens the door into the derelict alleyway, they’re already there waiting for him. Natasha looks restless, her face pressed into a cold, grim expression with her arms held tight at her side, pistol gripped in her hand. “We’ve got a potential mutant factory under our feet and you get lost on a tour of Oscorp?” she says bitterly. She pushes past Tony into the building, her steps careful as she scans the basement they’re in. Steve follows her, and Tony lets the door shut behind them.

  
“First, never say  _ mutant factory _ again,” Tony insists, setting his briefcase down at his feet. He kicks against the case, and it completely unravels, the metal uncurling and climbing up his legs like vines. Metal plating and wires cover every inch of him until the Iron Man suit completely reforms around him. He leaves the helmet down, watching Natasha with crossed arms. “Second, it took a shitload of finessing to get down here. That Linda lady was much harder to swoon than I expected.”

“No one asked you to  _ flirt _ your way in,” Steve says, deadpanned. He takes the lead towards the boiler room, outwardly confused when he enters. Tony points him in the direction of the door hidden behind the furnace, and the three of them crowd into the small space around the hatch.

“This isn’t Hydra’s symbol,” Steve notes as soon as he sees the logo stamped into the metal trapdoor. 

“It looks more like a cheap knock-off,” Tony remarks, shifting his weight to his left side and leaning against the wall. “Poor logo design aside, I can’t hack my way through this one. Think you can muscle it open, Cap?” 

Steve leans over the trap door, curling his fingers around the lip and pulling up. Tony expects him to rip it off the hinges without any resistance, but the door hardly budges. Rogers seems surprised at this too. He readjusts his grip, bends his knees and pulls up again. Slowly, the metal creaks and the door starts to move, the heavy slab of metal tilting up and back on its hinge. Tony steps in to help, bracing his iron-clad arms on the underside of the hatch and using a little extra power to tilt it open. Steve lets out the breath he’s been holding as soon as the door falls against the cement flooring. “Haven’t had that much trouble lifting something since I was 90 pounds.” The corner of Tony’s mouth tilts.

“Was that supposed to be a joke?”

Natasha audibly stifles a groan. “We don’t have time for this,” she says. The assassin is already climbing down into what appears to be the elevator beneath the trap door’s opening. Rogers climbs down, hot on her trail, leaving Tony to stand in his own shock that the ever up-tight  _ Captain America  _ just told a semi-decent joke. 

“I’m being serious, that was kinda funny,” Tony defends, arms spread out at his sides as he looks down at his teammates. “Didn’t know Cap could be funny.” He drops down into the elevator behind them. There’s only one button on the stainless steel, and there’s no key or fingerprint lock to prevent them from pushing it. They’re in. 

When they enter, the first thing Tony notices is quiet. They come out into a long, white hallway that resembles a hospital. Something about it immediately makes him uneasy. It’s not that he’s particularly afraid of hospitals. It’s the quiet that unsettles him. It’s not quiet he’s accustomed to at the Tower. There’s no background humming of machinery, no distant conversation, or far-off footsteps. It’s a completely empty silence. 

  
The lights in the hallway are bright, and his glasses dim automatically to block out the fluorescence. There are doors on all sides of them, discrete and unlabeled. They look almost as if they are meant to be part of the wall. “You know the plan,” Steve says as he starts walking forward. His shield is raised to his chin as he advances down the hall, ducking his head around the corner where the hallway splits. Natasha isn’t far behind him, her Glock 26 drawn and her Widow’s Bite bracelets sparking to life. 

Tony raises the head plate of his suit, FRIDAY’s HUD coming to life before his eyes. In the immediate area, his AI detects no heat signatures. “Let’s find their terminal,” he whispers to FRIDAY. He can see the flow of wires and electricity pulsing through the walls, stemming from all of the doors along the sides and converging together on the ceiling. Tony follows it through the twisting, labyrinth halls until he finally comes upon a large door at a dead end, the same snake-like symbol stamped on the front. He reaches for the handle on the door, but before he can, a deafening alarm shattered the quiet. 

The hallway is blanketed in red in a second, flashing with each pulsation of the alarm. 

  
  


The boy doesn’t know why the alarm starts, just that it jars him from his already restless slumber. His entire body buzzes with fear and anxiety. His senses are overwhelmed with suffocating  _ danger _ and it’s coming from all different directions. He crawls out from under his thin sheet, pressing his back in the corner, staring at the door with wide eyes. He’s never heard this noise before, but it’s piercing and the pain that ripples through his skull reminds him of the copper headpiece they force on him when he’s been bad. It  _ hurts,  _ it hurts so bad he’s pressing his shaking hands against his ears. There’s  _ danger _ , but the collar is locked around his neck. He’s trapped. 

The normal, binding fluorescence falls to black before harsh, red light blankets the room. The boy stares at the door. He expects the team of faceless men to burst through the door, torture on their fingertips. There’s a sudden, loud sound behind his door, and he flinches, curling in as close to himself as possible. He feels something wet and sticky on his hands, the warm substance pooling around his ears and dripping down the sides of his face. The pain is unbearable, his skull feeling like it’s splitting in two. 

There’s pounding at his door again, louder and more frantic with each passing second. He covers his eyes with trembling fingers. The terror crawls into his veins, his  _ sense _ screaming at him to run, to fight, to do  _ anything _ , but he can’t. He hasn’t been given instruction. He doesn’t know what to do. The thick scrap of metal around his neck prevents him from crawling up the wall into a safe corner like he does when he’s scared. He can do nothing but sit there as the metal of the door caves in and splinters. 

He looks at the last moment, and through the crimson light of the room, he sees a large silhouette with glowing white, empty eyes and a bright circular stamp at the chest. He freezes, breath caught in his throat. His fingers are burning to move, but they’re frozen where they’re locked on either side of his face. He stares unblinking at the figure, and it seems to stop in its tracks when it sees the boy. Suddenly, the figure takes a step forward, and under the dim light, he can see the glistening of metal. Something about this figure triggers something-- he thinks they may be called memories-- but he shakes the thought from his head. Memories will only get him hurt. Memories will  _ hurt him _ . An iron-clad arm reaches towards him, and the boy’s eyes lock on the circular lights stamped into its palm.  _ Fight _ , his instincts scream. It crawls beneath his skin and chews at his nerve endings.  _ Get up and fight! _

He launches himself from the bed, twisting the arm at the wrist and pushing the figure back. He’s shocked at the cold of metal that meets his hand when he shoves the silhouette back into the darkness of the doorway. The boy trips over his feet, the sheets from the bed tangled around his ankles as he flees to the opposite corner of the room. He stares at the camera that’s perched near the ceiling pleadingly. Usually, that camera brings him fear, but the only thing he can think now is how much he wants the faceless men to come in and save him. At least with them, he knows what to expect. 

“It’s okay,” a voice comes from the metal suit. The voice seems soothing, but it reminds him of when they speak to him through the radio in the ceiling. Cold, calculating, synthetic. He whimpers and clambers further into the corner as if it will swallow him up whole. “Kid, take a breath.” 

He wants to fight, his fingers curled so tightly into fists that he can feel the blood budding in his palm. He waits, the figure in metal standing so still by the doorway with its arms outstretched. He seems cautious, but the eyes of light that stare at him with nothing-- all he can see is the blank stare of the faceless men glaring back at him. The alarm is still blaring, and his senses are exploding and going haywire. He can hardly focus on one thing at a time, and it takes all of his strength to hear what the intruder is saying. The figure lifts an arm slowly to its head. 

“Turn this damn alarm off, FRI,” he whispers, but the boy can still hear it as he holds his breath. He continues to hold his breath until suddenly the alarm stops. He still cowers in the corner, shell-shocked and dumbfounded. He can’t remember a time when he’s seen anyone other than the men in white. No matter how hard he tries, he can’t remember any face or any name. In the few seconds he’s managed to see himself in the reflection of his empty dinner bowl, he doesn’t even recognize the person staring back at him. That’s why he stares in wonder at the intruder when suddenly the metal falls away and  _ someone _ is staring back at him. His hair is dark and his face is pulled taut. The boy can’t recall the last time he’s seen such a face, but the moment they lock eyes he feels an undeniable amount of recognition spark in his brain. It’s a deep, hidden part of his brain. But it’s there. He  _ recognizes _ this man, but he’s never seen him before. His headaches. 

The man won’t turn away from him, and he slumps in the corner with defeat. There’s nothing he can do to defend himself when the collar is locked around his neck. He sucks in a shaky breath and holds it there, waiting for whatever pain the familiar man is going to inflict on him.    
  
“It’s okay,” the man says again, and now that the metal mask is gone, he sounds so human and kind. The tenderness of his voice is enough for tears to start burning in the boy’s eyes. He quickly wipes the tears away. He knows how much the faceless men hate his tears. He’s not supposed to cry anymore. 

The stranger shifts and the boy thinks he hears a muffled, distant voice before the man is speaking again, but not to him. “I found him” he mutters as if trying to be discrete. “Can you guys hold them off?” There’s a muffled reply from somewhere inside the suit he’s wearing, but he can’t understand the words. His brain is  _ screaming _ at him, still reeling from the overwhelming amount of input it was trying to process at once. He stares at the stranger with wide eyes as he inches forward, his eyes taking in the entire room before locking on the collar around the boy’s neck. “That’s gotta be uncomfortable, right bud?” the man whispers, kneeling down at the knee and holding his hands out towards the boy like he was approaching a cornered, wild animal.

He gnaws on his lower lip.  _ Bud? _ No one has called him that before, but the feeling it gives in his gut reminds him of the  _ warmth _ he has somewhere buried in his brain. It’s distant, and each day it grows colder, but he can still feel it at times when he’s deep in sleep, or right now when he’s staring into a stranger’s eyes. The constant screaming of  _ danger _ settles into the background, now a dull buzz compared to the excruciating screeching it had been before. He can finally take a breath. He breaks contact with the stranger for one second and glances down at his hands. They’re coated in blood, both from the crescent-shaped cuts in his palms and the blood pouring from his ears and spread down his jaw and neck. He pitifully whines.

“I can take it off,” the man speaks, his arms still frozen in the air where they’re outstretched towards him. There are still a few feet between them, and it takes the boy every fiber in his being to stay still, staring at the man. He has to analyze and calculate his targets, the faceless men tell him.  _ Watch for weaknesses, _ they whisper in the back of his head. He shudders. But he doesn’t  _ want _ to hurt the man. At least, not yet. For the first time since he can remember, his overwhelming sense of danger has almost completely subsided. He almost feels… safe. But somehow that frightens him even more. He doesn’t want to fight anymore.

“Let me take it off,” he insists, voice still low. “I can hack into it and get it off. Easy peasy.” 

He nods uncertainty, and the stranger starts to creep towards him, his steps careful and calculated. At a certain point, the boy flinches and presses himself further into the corner of the room, watching the man through the corner of his eye with distrust. What if this was a test? How would the faceless men want him to react? He can’t take off the collar, can he?

“Wait-” he chokes out, his voice hoarse from disuse. He raises his arms, shielding himself from the stranger advancing towards him. 

The man pauses in his movement, eyes staring at the boy in surprise before softening. His face is gentle and, surprisingly, he smiles at him. “It’s okay,” he whispers. “I just need to see. You’re alright.”

Next thing he knows, the man’s hand is on the collar around his neck. His fingers curl beneath the edge of it, the cool metal of his gauntlet brushing up against his neck. He flinches, trying to squirm away but the man has a tight grip on the copper band. He hears a mechanical whirring after the man whispers something beneath his breath. In an instant, the collar falls from his neck in two parts, dumping in his lap. He reaches up, shocked, rubbing at his bare neck. The man retreats a few inches back, his hands held up. “See? Isn’t that better?” 

As soon as the copper falls away, he can feel his strength return to him in surges, dancing at his fingertips. He can  _ hear _ everything again, and the sound of distant shouting, gunfire, and banging catches his ears. He can hear the heartbeat of the man in front of him-- it’s fluttering and irregular, and he can tell the man in front of him is riddled with nerves. 

“Alright, up and at ‘em, kid. I know you’re probably scared, but there are a lot of bad people here. I’m sure you know that,” the man says. He glances over his shoulder, and the boy can hear the increase in his heart rate. Something’s coming. “You have to trust me.” The man extends a metal hand out towards him. 

There’s a sudden gunshot. The fear returns, crawling all over and burning through him like fire. He jolts upright, kicking aside the broken pieces of copper before launching himself towards the ceiling. He clambers along the top, launching himself out of the room. It’s the first time he’s seen this hallway, he has no idea which is the right direction but regardless he starts to run. He clambers along the walls, away from the sound of gunshots and shouting. He goes wherever his panic leads him, tries to find a corner where the constant feeling of  _ danger _ will finally go away.

As he rounds a corner, he slams into something hard and solid, and he falls to the ground. The base of his skull cracks against the cold tile; his head surges with a black wave and he sees stars. He lies there, stunned, with his arms cradling his neck as he curls up into himself. He scrambles back, cradling his skull as he stares at the broadness that had blocked his path. It’s another man, his hair blond and eyes bright but troubled as they stare down at him. He looks like some kind of soldier with his tactical gear and helmet, and his circular shield poised on his arm stirred some sort of recognition. He thinks he’s seen this symbol before, but he can’t take another moment to ponder it. He swallows his fear, climbing to his feet in panic before the man secures a hand on his shoulder. “Calm down, son,” he says. “We’re here to help.” 

Instinct takes over, his vision goes black, and he’s flipping the soldier over his shoulder, twisting the man’s wrist with a sickening crack. He can’t hear the man’s strangled cry as his back slams against the tile. The boy pulls up on the man’s arm, planting his foot on his shoulder as he yanks up with as much force as he could possibly muster. There’s a short pop and  _ tear _ , and the downed soldier cries out for help, hissing out a curse. He’s about to let go and run when a boot sweeps his legs out from under him and he crumples to the ground. Before he can bound to his feet, the base of his skull explodes with  _ MOVE _ , but he’s sluggish. He’s been slow to understand this extra sense buzzing beneath his skin ever since they started locking that horrific collar around his throat. 

The moment he hesitates is enough for something sharp and burning to hit him in the small of the back. A ripple of blinding, white agony tears through his body, and he completely loses control of his limbs. There’s electricity running through him, seizing his muscles and stopping his breath in his throat as he crumples onto the floor. 

_ He’s tied to the chair again. They’re wrapping thick straps across his wrists, ankles, middle, and forehead. He can’t move, but his entire body is screaming at him to run. It’s crying out as he lies still in that chair waiting for the pain to come. _

_ When the pain does come, it comes all at once. It’s an insufferable wave of agony that starts in his head, tightening around his skull like an iron band. The electricity dances on his skin, running from his fingers to his toes. His heart skips a beat in his chest, and over the sound of the constant, violent hum of electricity, he can hear his own heartbeat fluttering in his chest and bounding against his ribcage. They’re going to kill him. They’re going to kill him.  _

_ He sees a woman with brown hair and kind eyes framed with emerald green glasses. He hears her whisper sweet nothings into his ears and feels the way she kisses him in his hair. He hears a name-- Peter-- and the gentle murmuring of “I love you” before what he thinks are memories are pushed far back into the darkness. _

  
  


Natasha stands behind where the boy had been standing seconds prior, yanking Steve’s arm from his socket. Her wrist is still raised with her active Widow’s Bite aimed at the body convulsing on the ground. She watches carefully as he falls, the electricity jerking his muscles into a stop before its effects fade away. She expects him to leap back to his feet and lunge at her-- which is an expectation she feels with horror as she looks at the boy’s scrawny frame-- but the boy remains crumpled on the floor. His body tremors against the floor. 

When the boy is finally unconscious, only then does Tony have a moment to think. Things went south  _ fast _ . To be fair, he wasn’t sure what he had been expecting when attempting to rescue an enhanced child from an Oscorp-Hydra lab. If someone were to tell Tony that this is what his Thursday night would look like a few days ago, he’d laugh in their face. Now he wishes this was just a dream. He never felt as horrified as he did when he burst into the kid’s room. When the alarms were triggered and the entire facility went into an impenetrable shutdown, he had no other way to enter the room. And after he hears the boy  _ screaming _ through the metal door, he knows he has no other choice. 

That’s how he finds the boy, curled up in the corner of his bed against the wall with his hands clamped over his ears. Even beneath the red, pulsating light, Tony can see the blood pooling from the kid’s ears as he writhes at the horrific wailing of the sirens. While FRIDAY can’t undo the entire shutdown, the least she can do is disable the sound of the alarms blaring through the room. Almost immediately, he sees the child relax. 

It was one thing to see the boy in a blurry photo on his computer. It almost seems fake that way-- that the reality of this child being a subject of human experimentation is nothing more than what he would read in a Sci-Fi novel. But it’s another monster to see him in person. Tony’s never felt less equipped for a mission in his life, though he’ll never admit that to Natasha or Steve. Children have never been a demographic he has particularly appealed to in the past and thus has very little experience with. The closest he’s ever come to interacting with a damaged super-kid was with Wanda. And he’s not entirely proud of his handling of that situation. 

What haunts him the entire car ride home is the relief in the boy's eyes once he was freed from the collar. When he first saw it, Tony recognized it as a model similar to those power-suppressing collars Secretary Ross uses at the Raft. Based on how much of a fight the kid put up against Steve, Tony isn’t surprised that they would take such measures to keep him contained. If he was at his full power, he could rip those spineless bastards to bits. 

It should bother Tony that the thought of those men dying doesn’t face him. It doesn’t. 

The car ride home is a quiet affair. Natasha and Steve sit in the front, their face pale and taut as Tony sits in the back seat with the kid’s head cushioned on his thighs. The boy’s wrists are bound at the front in vibranium hand-cuffs. It’s the last thing Tony wants to do- to tie the kid up again after just setting him free- but Steve was adamant. It was for their own safety, for the  _ child’s  _ safety as they transported him to the tower.

If Tony says he has any clue what he will do with the little science experiment once he gets to the tower, it would be a total lie. Though he’ll never admit to that. He sits in the back seat of the car, his palm absent-mindedly resting on the kid’s burning forehead as he thinks. If Nick Fury or the rest of whatever was left of S.H.I.E.L.D find out about this, they’ll surely have a field day. It’ll be only a matter of time before Secretary Ross gets involved and throws the kid in the Raft. 

It’s a  _ horrifying _ thought. Tony can’t even consider Steve Rogers spending cold, hard time in the under-water deathtrap, and Tony  _ really _ didn’t like that man sometimes. He needs more time to think, more time to stall so that he can have some kind of plan in place before any government office comes raining down on Avengers tower like napalm. However, for the first time in Tony’s life, he draws a blank.

When they arrive at the tower, Steve and Tony settle the boy into a small, metal interrogation room in the basement. It’s not the place Tony would have loved to put a probably traumatized boy, but they didn’t know what they were dealing with. They had just kidnapped a Hydra-Oscorp hybrid experiment, and other than the fact that he could hold his own against Captain America, they had no idea the extent of his capabilities.

It hurts to see him in this tiny room. It’s hardly a step up from whatever hell they had the kid locked in beneath Oscorp. But Steve, ever the cautionary, insisted that the kid was too dangerous to trust yet. He was a product of Hydra, after all, and Tony had seen first hand what Bucky had been able to do. As much as he hated to admit it, Spangles was right. They have to air on the side of caution.

He stands outside of the cell on the opposite side of the one-way glass, pacing holes into the floor as he waits for the boy to wake up, Natasha leaning against the opposite wall across from him, while Steve heads to the infirmary. Inside the small room, the boy is strapped down to a chair with vibranium, his half-shaved head lulled against his chest.    
  
“Still want to go to that gala, Tony?” Natasha murmurs, her eyes unwavering from the limp figure on the other side of the glass. 

Tony can see the strain in her lips as she presses them into a thin line. Her eyes are narrowed and cold, as they usually are, but Tony can tell by the way she leans into the wall, her jaw clenched, that she’s worried for the boy. Tony can’t deny that he isn’t worried either, nor can he deny the gnawing guilt that eats away at him for trying to bail on this child. Someone who  _ needed _ saving.

“First of all, I resent that,” Tony chides, planting his feet firmly into the ground and turning to face Natasha. He can’t bear to look at the kid, not yet anyway. “You don’t think I know I messed up? I get it. But we got the kid, we did what you wanted.”

Natasha shifts, her lips twitching to the side with a grimace. “I guess I just didn’t expect it to be like pulling teeth,” she says, breaking her stare at the boy and finally turning to look at Tony. “When I tell you something’s important, I mean it.”

Tony’s mouth opens before he presses it shut again. He doesn’t have a quirky comeback. He’s messed up, and he can admit it, or at least not verbally deny it. All he can offer her is a curt nod before moving towards the window. He steps up to the class, leaning his forehead against the cool surface.

He’s not sure how long the two of them stand there in a tense silence before the kid finally stirs. Tony thinks he’s hallucinating— just for a moment— before the kid’s head lazily rises from his chest. His eyes are squinted and bleary, and for the first time, Tony notices the thick purple circles beneath the kid’s eyes. His skin is ashen and translucent. The kid just looks  _ sick.  _

Tony waits for the boy to realize what happened, to realize he’s in a foreign space. He waits for him to start jerking against his restraints, to try to escape. Except, the kid doesn’t do any of that. As the cloudiness clears from his eyes and is replaced with sobriety, the kid’s shoulders roll back, his posture erect against the chair. His mouth is pressed into a line with his jaw squared off, but he doesn’t struggle. He doesn’t attempt to get free but instead stares ahead as if he can see right through the two-way mirror. Right at Tony.

“Interrogation time,” Natasha chimes, though there is no joy or amusement in her tone. She moves towards the door to the cell, but Tony catches her wrist.

“Nuh-uh.” He steps in front of the door, pressing his back to it to cut off Natasha from entering the room. ”Gentlemen first.” It isn’t that he doesn’t trust Natasha— he would trust her with his life— but something, call it his pride, insists that he has to speak to the kid immediately. Natasha can get to her business later, but Tony needs his own questions answered. 

Natasha stares at him long and hard, her eyes flickering over his face until she relents. She steps back waving Tony away with the wave of her hand. “Suit yourself.” 

Tony nods and turns to the door, fiddling with his silver cufflinks. He can feel Natasha’s presence behind him, a silent expectation in the soft lull. He presses open the heavy metal door, stepping into the barren interrogation room. 

Immediately, the kid’s eyes lock onto his. He watches with calculated silence as Tony walls forward, slowly, towards the single chair at the opposite end of the steel table. It’s nearly six feet long, but Tony is sure it won’t matter. If the kid gets loose, he could be dead in seconds. It didn’t matter if there was a table there as a buffer. But the kid shows no signs of fighting. His white-knuckles fists are baller around the arms of the chair, his honey-brown eyes bearing into Tony’s own as he finally takes his seat.

The metal chair scrapes loudly against the tiled floor, and the boy cringes away at the sound, his head ducking down in a violent flinch with his eyes scrunched shut. Tony recognizes the exact defensive posture from when he first found the boy hunched in the corner of his cell. 

“Don’t worry,” Tony says, and he can’t help but since at his attempt to sound comforting. Nurturing wasn’t his thing; he sure as hell didn’t learn it from Howard, so where else was he supposed to figure out how to talk to teenagers? “Just a loud chair. What, you’ve got super hearing or something? You could hear us coming, couldn’t you?”

The boy doesn’t say anything right away. He blinks his eyes open, squinting at the bright fluorescent light radiating from above the room. His chapped lips part, only for a moment. Then he snaps them shut. His eyes scan Tony up and down, his head tilts, and Tony swears he can see the slightest flicker of recognition in his eyes. 

“You’re Tony Stark.” The boy’s voice is gravelly and rough, probably from disuse, Tony hypothesizes. But it’s nonetheless the voice of a  _ child. _ He says the name with curiosity, the edges of his lips tugging down as he speaks. Tony expects to hear a product of Hydra to speak of him with disdain and contempt. But this boy simply seems confused.

“The one and only,” Tony sighs. The boy’s faint expression of curiosity doesn’t change. “Though you look like a roughed-up cabbage patch kid, so I guess that’s  _ Mr.  _ Stark to you.” 

  
“Who’s the other one?” The kid asks. His eyes dart to the one-way mirror poised behind Tony, and a knowing smile tugs at the corner of Tony’s lips.    
  
“So you  _ do _ have super-hearing, huh?” He looks over the kid— his skinny ribs, protruding collar bones, bright wide eyes. “Who are you? How old are you? Where did you come from?” He leans forward in his chair, resting his elbows on the edge of the table and clasping his hands together. “I need answers, kid.”

The boy seems taken aback at the questions— his lips parted in surprise and eyes wide as he stares at Tony. His fists are still tight from where they grasp the arms of the chairs, yet Tony can see the faint tremble in his grip. “Fifteen.”

Tony blinks. “What?”

“I’m fifteen… I think,” the boy whispers, his eyebrows knitted together. “I had a job to do, but I.. wasn’t ready yet. I wasn’t  _ good. _ ”

Tony fights the frown that’s tugging on his lips. He shouldn’t be surprised. This is Hydra’s entire M.O— to destroy these innocent people’s lives and turn them into superweapons. But to kidnap and torture a fifteen-year-old kid to do your dirty work? Tony wants to go back to that base and give them another beat down.

Instead, he maintains his composure and looks the boy in the eye. “That doesn’t do much for me, cabbage patch, but it is a start,” he says. “Let’s try something easy… what’s your name?”

_ “What is your name?!” _

_ Zap. Pain. Bloodcurdling scream. There are hands all over him, and no matter how hard he tries to buck them off, they never let go. _

_ “Please, don’t do this-“ _

_ Agony. It ripples through his skin like a million volts of electricity. It’s burning him from the inside out. _

_ “What is your name?” _

“Hey, kid!”

Tony isn’t sure what had happened. Upon asking for the kid’s name, the poor boy’s body went rigid, his eyes immediately springing with tears. He tried to crawl away and curl himself up in the chair, but the vibrating cuffs are keeping him bolted in place. He writhes and cries, head hung low as his breath comes in ragged and uneven pants. 

Tony stands from his chair, completely terrified. He’s sure Romanov is watching him through the mirror with the smuggest look she can muster, but Tony’s not ready to give up just yet. He was never the best at dealing with his  _ own _ panic attacks, so he doesn’t even comprehend how he will approach the kid. However, with each passing second, the boy is hyperventilating more and more until Tony is sure he’s not inhaling any air at all.   
  
He rounds the table, his hands held out in a peaceful gesture. The last thing he needs is to set the boy off, but if he continues to hyperventilate his way into a panic attack, Tony will get nothing out of him. Cautiously, he inches towards the boy from the side, but he flinches from where he’s bound in the chair. The boy whips his head around, wide, tearful eyes staring Tony down with a distrustful look. He pulls his bony wrists against the vibranium cuffs, and if Tony’s eyes don’t deceive him, he’s sure that the metal is slowly  _ bending _ . 

“Hey, hey.” Tony’s voice is low and quiet, and he keeps his hands out in front of him to show he’s not a threat. Without his suit, he really isn’t any kind of threat compared to this kid. “I won’t hurt you. No one’s going to hurt you anymore.”   
  


Tony intends to keep this promise. He will figure out everything he can to keep this kid safe, even if he has to go through S.H.I.E.L.D, Nick Fury, Secretary Ross, or even Hydra to do so. The tears budding in the kid’s bright, wide eyes is enough to solidify this.

  
However, Tony’s words calm the kid down one bit. He’s openly crying now, ducking his head down and away from Tony’s outstretched hands. His posture is defensive and tense, his eyes scrunching shut as he tucks his chin to his chest in an attempt to make himself seem as small as possible.

“Kid, relax.” Against his better judgment, Tony rests a hand on the kid’s tense shoulder. He jerks violently at the touch before his eyes lock onto Tony’s. To say he’s unnerved by the horror in the boy’s face would be an understatement. 

“I’m supposed to hurt you.” The boy’s voice surprises Tony, and the man can only stare at the kid as anger, disbelief, and horror cross his face all at once. “That was what I was supposed to do. I had to eliminate Iron Man and Captain America. That was my mission. That…  _ is  _ my mission.”   
  


Tony steps back, just a bit, but manages to keep a grounding hand on the kid’s shoulder. It’s disconcerting that the enhanced teenager had means and motive to literally murder him, but he was trapped in a room of vibranium with Black Widow watching from outside. He has to stand his ground; this is the most amount of information he’s gotten. 

  
“Do you want to hurt us?” Tony asks. It’s the last question he should be asking. He should be demanding more information about the Hydra-Oscorp laboratory, about  _ why _ he needed to take out the two heads of the Avengers, about  _ who _ was in charge. But the forefront thought on Tony’s mind is that this is a  _ child _ who’s been kidnapped, manipulated, and experimented on.    
  
The kid’s face draws blank for a moment before his lips curl into a deep frown and he shakes his head. “No… Please, I don’t want to do this anymore. I don’t want to hurt anyone--”   
  
Tony shakes his head, his brows knitted together. “You don’t have to hurt anybody,” Tony whispers. “No one here is going to hurt you either. We just need some answers. Who… gave you that mission? Who’s in charge under that building, kid?”

The boy, his head lowered so that Tony can only look at the shaved side of his face, shakes his head. “I don’t want to talk anymore.” 

Tony takes in a sharp breath, releasing his hold on the boy’s shoulder and backing away, stowing his hands into his blazer pockets. He doesn’t want to push the kid too far-- after all, he’s basically trapped in a room with an enhanced individual who could kill him in the blink of an eye-- but he’s short on time and has way too many questions to ask.

He figures that he needs to do some of his own digging before he’s ready to talk to the kid again.

“Alright, no more talking,” Tony relents as he heads back towards the door. “Are you hungry? Who am I kidding, of course you’re hungry. I’ll make sure someone brings you some lunch. Got any food allergies I should know about?”

The boy raises his head, exhaustion tugging at each movement he makes, his eyelids drooping as he stares at Tony in mild confusion. He can’t help but think that the kid looks like a lost puppy. A really sad kicked puppy, but a puppy nonetheless.    
  
“I’ll take your silence as a no,” Tony mumbles, clicking his tongue against the roof of his mouth. The kid is difficult to figure out, but Tony knows he has to give it time-- as much time as he can buy. “I’ll just avoid anything with nuts then.”

With that, Tony closes the door behind him, fighting the urge to look back through the window. When he enters the observation room, Natasha is long gone. Tony frowns. There goes his one safety net.

  
  
  
  


“FRI, pull up any missing kid cases in the eastern United States between 2001 and 2015.” He kicks his feet up on the table, narrowing his eyes at the array of computer monitors as FRIDAY pulls up thousands of case files from the public record. Thousands of child’s faces ranging from infants to young teenagers flash across his screen. He runs his hands over his face, humming to himself. There are simply too many cases to sort through each one. 

“Narrow it down to caucasian boys from the New York area,” he says as he watches the files consolidate to a few hundred. “Body never found.” Even fewer files, probably no more than 150 are left. Still too many to choose from. “Any of their faces match the Hydra kid, FRIDAY?”   
  
FRIDAY scans through the files in the blink of an eye, countless unfamiliar faces flashing across the screen. Tony has never realized how many children go missing in such a small area in only a few years. He makes a mental note to come back to this for his future general welfare project. Green energy can wait.

“Negative, boss,” FRI chimes, her voice tight in frustration, “But I have found one case file dated from 2007 that appears to be tampered with. It’s completely encrypted.”

Tony’s brow furrows. That definitely seems fishy. “Well, what are you waiting for, dear? Decrypt it for me.”

FRIDAY gets to work immediately, the case file pulling up though its contents are completely scrambled. It’s an intense firewall, similar to the one Tony dismantled back at the Hydra base. It isn’t anything Tony couldn’t crack, and with the help of FRIDAY, it will be a piece of cake.

  
“File decryption at thirty-seven percent,” she says, a small green progress bar scrolling across the bottom of the center monitor. “The firewalls are incredibly thick and complex. This may take a moment.”

Tony watches the bar scroll by bit by bit, anxiously biting at his nails as he leans far back in his chair. This is a shot in the dark, at best, and Tony might walk away from his research project none-the-wiser. However, this kid was fifteen, and he had to have come from somewhere. There must be  _ someone _ looking for their son. At least, that’s what Tony hopes.    
  
It takes a special type of monster to torture children. He witnessed this first hand with Wanda. She was far too young to enter their world, but a lifetime of suffering was bestowed upon her by that one Stark Missile. Tony will never let go of that guilt, and for some reason, he can’t fully understand, he feels that guilt with this boy as well. 

  
“Any luck?” Tony jumps and turns in his chair to see Rogers standing in the doorway, leaning against the frame with his arms crossed over his broad chest. He’s changed out of his uniform, now wearing a simple gray t-shirt and jeans. The domestic look is something that Tony never gets used to seeing on Steve Rogers.    
  
“What have I told you about sneaking up on me?” Tony snaps. Ever since the Battle of New York, he doesn’t particularly take  _ well _ to being startled. He faces enough of that in his nightmares when he remembers what kinds of creatures live out of their reach. He shakes his head. Aliens are a problem for a different day. He turns to face the computer again, placing his feet back on the floor and leaning over the keyboard with his elbows braced on either side. 

“No luck so far,” Tony says, defeated. “The kid’s face doesn’t match any missing person records. FRIDAY detected one being tampered with back in 2007, but it’s locked behind a pretty hefty firewall.”

Steve steps into the room, standing behind Tony as he looks at the screens-- at all of the missing persons reports still displayed across the monitors. His eyes flicker from screen to screen, his eyebrows knitted together as if trying to make sense of what he is seeing.    
  
“What’s your plan, Stark?” Steve tears his gaze away from the computer to look at Tony. He sits with his back still to Rogers, staring at the small progress bar at the bottom of the screen as it inches along, though he can  _ feel  _ Steve’s stare in the back of his head. The bar moves little by little-- forty-six percent, fifty-nine percent, sixty-two percent, and so on. He taps his fingers on the table impatiently. He needs to reconfigure FRIDAY’s hacking mainframe.

“Tony,” Steve insists, stepping up to Tony’s side in an attempt to catch his eye. Tony has  _ no _ desire to talk with him about his plans because he has no clue what he’s going to do. Caring for mutant teenagers is far out of his genius scope, so he feels like he’s a fish stranded out of water. If he doesn’t think of something quick, Secretary Ross will be on him before he can blink, and the kid will be taken from him. The child may have been kidnapped and experimented on by Hydra and Oscorp, but that doesn’t mean the rest of his life should be doomed in an underwater holding cell. The kid has done nothing  _ wrong _ .

  
“I don’t know what I’m going to do, Spangled,” Tony sighs, shaking his head. He finally tilts his head to look at Rogers, whose eyes are narrowed and lips are tugged into a scowl. “Do you have something to add Captain Righteous, because I’m open to suggestions.” 

Steve Rogers doesn’t seem fazed by Tony’s sting, as usual, and he instead moves to face Tony, leaning against the side of the table with his arms crossed.  _ For the love of God, uncross your arms and stop looking at me like I’m a delinquent teenager, _ Tony thinks. He has to hold himself back from saying it.    
  
“I don’t know, Tony,” Steve admits, the crook in his brow finally smoothing over. The man shakes his head and glances over the room. “He’s a product of  _ Hydra _ , Tony. He’s dangerous.”

  
Tony scoffs. The  _ nerve _ of this man-- everything just has to be a threat. “He’s a kid-”

“A  _ dangerous _ kid,” Rogers retorts, pressing his palm on the table. Tony stares at the blond, not wanting to hear another word he has to say. “It’s hard to admit, but you  _ saw _ the way he fought, Tony. He’s just like Bucky. They had to have been training him for something. Oscorp was just helping Hydra make their next super soldier.”   
  
“You seem like you’re an expert with curing Russian super soldiers, so why don’t you take point on this, then?” Tony is getting tired of hearing Steve’s voice. It’s utterly exhausting, and he can’t bear to think of that fifteen-year-old kid as anything other than a victim. He’s no  _ super-soldier _ \-- he’s absolutely nothing like Barnes. Tony didn’t see a single ounce of fear he saw in that kid’s face in the face of Bucky Barnes.

Steve hesitates. Tony can see the gears turning in his head as he pushes himself off of the table and paces across the room. He pauses by the opposite wall, running a hand across his jawline with thought, “I might want to bring Bucky in. He knows firsthand--”

Tony blanches and leaps to his feet, his chair sliding backward as he whips around to face Rogers. He clenches his jaw. “If you think for a  _ moment _ that I will allow Barnes to come within one-hundred feet of this building, you are even more delusional than I thought. I barely managed to forgive  _ you _ , but you’re a fool if you think I will--”

FRIDAY’s cool, calculating voice interrupts his tirade. “I’m sorry to interject, Boss, but I have finished decrypting the file.”

Tony shifts his weight from his right leg to the left, spinning on his heel to turn his back on Rogers and return to his seat in front of the computer. He pulls himself closer to the desk, tapping on the uploaded file in the center of the main screen. The digital document folds out, an old security photo of an alleyway pinned in the top corner as his eyes skim the following police report. “Tell me what I’m looking at, FRI.”   
  
“August 11th, 2007. Two parents and their six-year-old son were driving home along Queens Boulevard at 11:00 PM when they were rear-ended by another vehicle. The bodies of both parents-- later confirmed to be May and Richard Parker-- were found deposited in an alleyway adjacent to the crash site. Their son, Peter Parker, who was reportedly in the vehicle, was never found.”

Tony’s brow furrows at that. There was what seemed to be a minor fender bender that ended with two parents disposed of in an alleyway while their son was nowhere to be found?    
  
“Any witness reports?” Tony asks, to which FRIDAY denies. The rest of the file is suspiciously blank. There’s nothing that stands out in the report that would justify it being blocked behind mile-wide firewalls. He feels Steve step up behind him, reading over the report himself. Tony gnaws at his lower lip. If this Parker kid was six when he went missing in 2007, then he would definitely be fifteen now. This  _ could _ be the kid.

Steve is the next one to speak up. “Is there a picture of Peter Parker attached to the report?” he asks.   
  
“The original missing person report seems to have a photo attached, but it’s been retroactively removed,” FRIDAY reports. “Attempting to recover now.”   
  


On the screen, the Parker file along with all other missing person reports closes. After a tense minute in which Tony and Steve sit in silence, FRIDAY procures a single image on the screen. Tony feels as if his breath is punched from his chest.

It’s the kid-- with his eyes just as wide, brown, and innocent as they are now. His hair is long and curly in the photo, and the boy smiles. He has his hands on a fork as he stuffs birthday cake in his mouth, a small blue party head secured to the top of his head with a thin elastic band. Tony never thought he liked kids, but the innocent face staring at him through the photo is absolutely adorable. His heart aches for the child. He was stripped of this warm childhood when he was only six? The kid-- Peter, his name is  _ Peter _ \-- has been with Hydra for almost ten years?

“That’s him.” Tony mumbles. It still feels like a dream. He finally has a face to the name. He only has one more unanswered question. “FRIDAY, any surviving family of the Parkers?”

She’s scanning through several different files, all moving too fast for Tony to properly read before she comes across the face of a woman with long brown hair and clear-rimmed glasses. “May Parker, the wife of Richard Parker’s brother Benjamin Parker, is the only living relative in my database. She currently resides in an apartment building in the center of Queens. Would you like me to contact Mrs. Parker?” 

Tony shakes his head. “No, no, that’s enough. Thanks, FRI.” She powers down, the files on the screen disappearing until all of the monitors mounted on the desk are black. Tony scowls at the reflection in the dark screen staring back at him. He’s horrified.

He leans forward, burying his face in his hands. “He has family,” he mumbles to no one in particular. It was one challenge that there was an unnamed, unclaimed kid on his hands, but now he has a name-- Peter Parker-- and he has  _ family _ that may still be wondering where the hell their baby nephew disappeared to.

“All the more reason to get help,” Steve says. Tony stirs and lifts his head from his hands, casting him a wary glance. The  _ last _ thing he wants is for Rogers to get his way, but if he has any chance at fixing a boy who's been brainwashed by Hydra for ten years, he’ll need help from someone more experienced, no matter how much it may hurt his pride.

  
When he comes back to the interrogation room, Natasha is sitting inside. She’s poised across the table from the boy, balancing on the edge of the table. Her body language is relaxed as she speaks to the boy, whose head is hung low, his eyes bleary and exhausted. Through the glass, he can’t hear a word she is saying. Well, he hopes that she won’t mind him crashing their party.

He pushes through the door. Natasha turns to face him as he enters and clicks the door softly shut behind him. He notices a small dinner tray sitting in front of the boy, completely untouched. Peter’s face is twisted into a scowl as he stares down at his lap, eyes flickering between the sandwich and Natasha from the corner of his eyes.    
  
Natasha and Tony exchange a brief glance. She gestures to the empty chair on the opposite side of Peter. “Come sit, Tony,” she insists. “I was just trying to get him to eat.”   
  
Tony looks at the kid, then down to the plate. Forcing food down his throat obviously wouldn’t be a smart option, but the boy looks so wasted away in that stainless steel chair already that Tony’s sure he’ll be nothing but bone after another day. “No appetite, cabbage patch?”

Peter doesn’t look up at Tony when he speaks, his lips pressed into a line. He can tell by the way his tense shoulders tremble that the boy is terrified. “Don’t want to talk either? You were talking to me lots earlier, kid. Or should I say, Peter?”

The boy goes rigid, his head shooting bolt upright as he stares at Tony, tears filling his eyes. His forehead creased and his eyes started to dart around the room as if solving a complicated equation. Tony watches with unease, and he can feel Natasha staring at him from his side. 

  
He turns his head to face her. Her eyebrow is raised inquisitively. He nods her way, hoping she understands that she needs to  _ trust _ him if they want to get anything out of this kid. The boy definitely reacted to his name, which means Tony was on the right track. From his brief conversation with Steve, he learned that making connections with his past life was the best way to clear whatever mind-control Hydra may have on him. It’s not much, but until Steve can find a way to get Bucky here quickly, this is the best Tony’s got.

“How do you-- what?” The boy finally speaks. He trips over his words, averting his gaze and staring a hole into the surface of the stainless steel table. “No, no, that’s not my name--”

“I think that is your name, bambino,” Tony says, folding his hands together and interlocking his fingers. He rests his elbows on the table, never taking his eyes off of the boy. “Peter Parker. That  _ was _ your name, at least. Before whatever this is.”   
  
Peter’s eyebrows scrunch up, his mouth twisting, and his fingers starting to curl and uncurl around the arms of the chair. The cuffs are off of his wrists; Natasha probably let him lose for a moment so he could eat his sandwich, but the skin of his wrists are red and rubbed raw. “No, no,” the boy whispers. “No. You’re just trying to trick me.”   
  
Tony tilts his head. He can’t fathom why the boy would think that pointing out his  _ name _ could possibly be a trick. Unless, Tony wonders, they stripped him of his name. It wouldn’t be too far of a stretch. After all, Bucky Barnes turned into the Winter Soldier upon being kidnapped by Hydra. It is expected that they would strip any of his remaining identity from him in an attempt to gain power over him. But Barnes was a grown man. Peter Parker is-- was-- a  _ child _ . An unsuspecting child who has done nothing in his life to deserve this much turmoil.

  
“Okay, I’ll bite. What did  _ they _ call you? What did they tell you your name was?” Before Peter can tense up just as he had earlier, Tony interjects. “There’s no wrong answer, kid. Just tell me the truth. No one is going to hurt you.”   
  
“Tony, what are you doing?” Natasha whispers, but he lifts a hand to her. He’s onto something, and he can’t have Romanov throwing the kid off, not when Tony has him right where he wants him. He needs to get Peter to trust him, to believe that he will do nothing to hurt him. Because it’s nothing but the truth. 

Tony wants nothing more than to take the kid under his own wing and protect him from anyone who may come for him. Realistically, however, Tony knows that he can’t do that. Not without enough information.   
  
The boy hesitates, his eyes overflowing with tears that silently roll down his reddened cheeks. Tony wants to wipe them away-- a very overwhelming yet out-of-character urge of tenderness that completely takes him by surprise. Peter looks up at him, squinting through his tears before he croaks a quiet, “No… wrong answers?”

Tony forces a slight smile onto his lips. He nods at the kid. “No wrong answers.”   
  
Peter sits for another moment as if contemplating the consequences of answering the question. Tony’s ready to admit that he hadn’t expected to get this far with the kid within one day-- he had expected a completely stoic and abrasive soldier just as Barnes seemed to be. But at the end of the day, it’s just another stark reminder that the  _ soldier _ in front of him is a fifteen-year-old kid.

  
“They called me all different names,” the boy admits. “But they didn’t want me to… remember my old name.” 

Tony clears his throat.  _ Patience _ , he reminds himself. Before he can ask further questions, Natasha beats him to it. She leans forward from where she’s perched on the table, offering the cowering boy a gentle smile. Tony thinks she’s never appeared this  _ warm _ before. “What other names did they call you then?” she asks, her voice quiet. 

Another quiet tear slips out of the boy’s eyes, and he doesn’t seem to notice it by the way he stares at Natasha without blinking. Tony can see the way his fingers shake. 

“The scientist called me a bunch of numbers,” the boy whispers, shaking his head as he searches his brain for the right words. “Like… zero four… something.”   
  
“08-14?” Natasha recites from the initial data collection she and Steve presented to Tony the other day. It’s the subject number associated with the kid, though Tony guessed it was used for confidential record-keeping, not naming a literal child. 

The boy nods at Natasha’s words before licking at his lips and parting them to speak again. “But the faceless men were the ones who made my new name,” he mutters as if the words filled him with deep shame. “Паук.”

Natasha goes rigid beside Tony, though he has no idea what the kid just said. It sounds Slavic-- Russian, maybe. He turns to Natasha, his eyes narrowed as he stares her down. She looks to him, her eyes sparkling with recognition. “What’s that mean, Nat? You’re gonna have to help me out here, I haven’t touched by DuoLingo Russian lessons in a while.” 

She rolls her eyes at him and shakes her head. “I’ll tell you later,” she insists, before turning to Peter, her expression softening. “Thank you for telling us, Peter.” She doesn’t react to the way the boy flinches at the name. Tony thinks she’s smart for using it-- it’s better they start ingraining his actual  _ name _ into his head now rather than waiting until it’s too late.    
  
She stands up, her eyes still locked on Peter as she gestures to the sandwich. “Why don’t you eat? Unless you would like something else.”

  
The boy eyes the bread, tentatively reaching his hand up to poke at the food, as if he’s never seen it before. He scrunches his eyebrows at it, his hands trembling as he moves to pick it up. “What… is it?” he asks.

Tony has to fight the urge to turn and leave the room that instant. He’s not sure why the kid not knowing what a  _ sandwich _ is is his final straw but for some reason he is and Tony wants to abort. He knows he’s bitten off more than he can chew, and he can thank his ridiculously large guilt-complex for that. However, he’s come this far, and he cannot abandon this kid now. As much as Tony wants to deny it, Peter needs him.

“It’s a sandwich, cabbage patch,” Tony says with an encouraging smile. “Nothing really but meat, cheese, and bread. Don’t tell me you’re used to something fancier, because while I may be a billionaire, I’m not in the mood to splurge on some filet mignons for a fifteen-year-old.” Natasha elbows him hard in the ribs. 

The joke flies over the kid’s head, but that’s okay. He carefully picks up the sandwich and holds it to his nose, sniffing it tentatively. “It’s food?”

Natasha nods at the boy, urging him on. “It’s food. I promise it’ll be good,” she says. “Just give it a try.”   
  


There’s an unusual amount of trust and vulnerability in the boy’s eyes as he raises the sandwich to his lips with trembling hands. The tears in his eyes are gone, replaced with a cautious yet prevalent look of wonder as he takes a bite into the soft bread. His cheeks are still red and stick, coated with his silently-shed tears, but Tony’s sure they can get him cleaned up and maybe in an actual bedroom soon. Or, he  _ hopes _ . He has no idea what’s going to happen from here.

The boy silently eats, the first bite devolving into a second, then a third, and a fourth until suddenly the sandwich is gone and the kid’s cheeks are stuffed full of bread. Tony bites back a smirk-- at least the kid has a decent appetite. 

“We’ll bring you more soon, okay?” Tony chimes as he moves to stand up. Natasha moves to the door, and Tony takes note that she isn’t strapping him back down to the chair. The room is made of mostly vibranium, and FRIDAY has close monitoring on the security of the room, so Tony doesn’t see the harm in it. The boy’s wrists are far too raw and bruised anyway. “Sit tight.” Tony follows Natasha out of the door. 

He shuts the door tight behind him, raising his eyes to see Natasha standing in front of him with her arms lax at her sides, her eyes darting across the floor. There’s a deep, unsettling feeling stirring in his gut when thinking of her reaction to the kid speaking Russian, so he assumes the worst when she finally looks him in the eye.   
  
“He can hear us,” she says instead, gesturing vaguely towards the one-way mirror. “We should talk somewhere in private.”

That’s how he ends up sitting in the main dining area on the fortieth floor with Natasha and Steve. Tony stares at the bowl of cereal sitting in front of him. When he stepped out of the elevator he had made himself a bowl. It must have been out of pure stress, because now as he stares down at his Cap’n Crunch, which is now soggy from sitting in the milk for too long, he has no appetite. He pushes the bowl away from him with an exaggerated sigh.   
  
“Are you going to tell me what the kid said or are you enjoying leaving me in absolute suspense?” Tony quirks with frustration. He doesn’t understand why Natasha is being so secretive about it. After all, the more about Peter they knew, the faster they could figure out how to fix him and how to protect him from prying government eyes. 

He hasn’t discussed it between Natasha and Steve, but he knows neither of them want to turn the kid over to the Feds. Under Secretary Ross, there’s no telling what may happen to the kid. For the first time since the incident went down, Tony thinks he can somewhat understand what Rogers felt when the Accords were first presented. Albeit he literally met this kid today and Barnes was Rogers’ old war buddy, Tony can now understand the need to protect someone from another’s actions. For now, he shakes it off. No time for existential dread today.

“The kid’s file mentioned progress with cross-species experimentation,” Natasha says instead of answering his question, which draws a long, tired sigh from Tony. He’s tired of beating around the bush, but he supposes he’ll humor Romanov for a moment. “The way that kid moved along the walls… I should’ve realized it sooner.”

Tony isn’t sure what she’s hinting at, but he suddenly, with a start, remembers the way the kid launched himself onto the ceiling and started to  _ crawl _ across it as if it was second nature. In the moment, he had been too shocked and bustling with adrenaline to think much of it, but now that he considers all the information he has gathered, there’s already a formed conclusion.   
  
“Паук means spider,” Natasha says, leaning back in her chair and kicking one foot up onto the edge of the table. Tony thinks back to the basement network beneath Oscorp, remembers the boxes of fluorescent spiders frozen in time, with one box in the center missing.  _ #08-14. _

“Oscorp helped Hydra make a spider-hybrid super soldier?” Tony wonders aloud. It’s the only plausible option-- the way the kid clung to ceilings, the corresponding serial numbers, the  _ name _ . 

“They failed with Bucky,” Steve chimes in. He’s not sitting at the table but instead lingers a few feet away with his hands tucked inside his pockets. He’s been watching them from afar, though Tony can always feel the stare of those brooding eyes bearing into the back of his head. “They’re trying something bigger. Something  _ stronger _ . Oscorp gave them the means to do it.”   
  
Tony nods. Oscorp’s infamous work with cross-species genetics was bound to catch the attention of a few bad apples. It’s just his luck that those bad apples happen to be Hydra of all things. God, he’s so  _ tired _ of dealing with these bastards. 

“So we’re dealing with a spider-super kid,” Tony states, his voice monotone as he struggles to unpackage that sentence. Handling teenagers seems difficult enough, but dealing with a teenager that’s part spider? Tony doesn’t think even all of the worlds’ parenting books can prepare him for that. “Now what?”   
  
“Bucky will come,” Steve announces, turning to face Tony. He doesn’t speak with hesitancy as he had before. He’s no longer afraid of what Tony has to think because, in reality, they have no other choice. “He can help us figure out what we’re dealing with, and we go from there.”

“Until then, we should continue interrogations, or whatever the hell it is we’re doing,” Natasha says. She plays with the sleeves of her shirt as she speaks, twisting the loose fabric around her fingers before stretching it back out again. “The more information we can get from the kid the better. By the time S.H.I.E.L.D or Ross get involved, we’ll have more than enough evidence to prove he isn’t a threat.”   
  


Steve, ever the pessimist it seems, has to rain on their parade. “What if he  _ is _ a threat? Then what? You saw how he attacked me back at the base. Who’s to say he won’t do it again?”

Tony sits upright in his chair, lazily grasping his spoon and shoving a soggy mouthful of Cap’n Crunch into his mouth. If anything, he hopes it’s an insult to Steve Rogers.  _ This _ is Tony’s captain. He swallows, his throat aching. “That’s not an option, Rogers,” he insists. “We’re bringing Barnes here, endangering  _ everyone _ in this building to ensure that. Aren’t we, Captain?”

Steve relents, allowing his arms to relax at his sides. “We just have to be prepared for the worst-case scenario.”

“Yeah, and in my plan, there is no worst-case scenario,” Tony snarls. “We prove that he isn’t a threat, we get him assimilated, and we find him a place at the tower. Simple as that.”

Steve turns and blinks at Tony with surprise. “You’re going to take him in? What about that woman, May Parker? She has a right to know where her nephew is.”   
  
“As far as Mrs. Parker knows, Peter Parker has been dead for years,” Tony retorts, reaching a hand up to pinch the bridge of his nose. He feels a massive migraine coming, but he figures any time he talks to Rogers for an extended period of time the headaches come. It was only a matter of time. “He’s not a normal kid anymore. He’s fifteen and has a lot more changes to deal with than puberty. We keep him here and shape him up until he can control his powers.”   
  
Neither Natasha or Steve have anything to say in regards to his plan, so Tony takes his small victory. The Cap’n Crunch is bitter in his mouth, so he snags the bowl from the table and dumps it down the garbage disposal. The flip phone in Rogers’ pocket begins to ring, so he pulls it out, presses it to his ear, and excuses himself from the room. Natasha stands from her place at the table and trails over to where Tony aimlessly stands in the kitchen.

“Are you sure you can do this?” she asks, her forehead creased in concern as she leans in close to Tony to ask him in a hushed voice. Tony’s grateful for her-- for so many reasons-- but she’s ever the diplomat, and in such a polarizing time, he can really appreciate that. Even though she  _ did _ technically turn on him with the Barnes business. Regardless, he puts that behind him. “Taking in this kid will be a lot of trouble. It may not go how you want it to.”   
  
“I don’t have another choice,” Tony admits. Because in truth, he doesn’t. Either he takes this kid under his wing and attempts to undo whatever evil Hydra implanted in his little head, or the government gets its grimy hands on him and he rots for the rest of his days in some kind of prison or another research facility. The decision is an easy one in Tony’s book. “It has to work.”   
  
“I’m with you,” she assures him, covering his hand with one of her own and brushing the top of his knuckles with the pad of her thumb. 

Tony makes a decision then. If he’s going to start treating the kid as part of the large, dysfunctional family, he needs an upgrade. “I want the kid to move out of that room by tomorrow,” he insists. “There’s plenty of bedrooms. Put him in one and we’ll reinforce the doors to be safe. The kid needs a proper bed.”

  
Natasha nods. Surely she understands how awful it was to see the kid chained to a stainless steel chair in a bleak interrogation room under harsh fluorescent lighting. “Consider it done,” she says.

Only then can Tony relax, just a tiny bit.

  
  


The next several days pass with repetitive motions. Steve moves Peter to a lone room on the eightieth floor of the tower, where two of Tony’s labs reside. He kept that empty bedroom there in case of late nights he spent at the lab in which he got the rare moment of shut-eye, but for now, it will function as a base for the kid where Tony can keep a close eye on him.   
  
The boy doesn’t take well to the room at first. It takes several nights for Tony to fully convince him to sleep  _ on _ the bed instead of under or beside it, but once the boy settles in the sheets, he’s usually out like a light. Each day, he enters the boy’s room, a housing unit for his gauntlet hidden in his watch for emergencies, with a tray of different breakfast foods and an array of different questions. The first few days, he learns very little, though through observation he is able to see how the boy functions. He spends lots of time suctioned onto ceilings, either tucked in the top corners of rooms or hanging by his feet in the center. Tony walked in on more than one occasion to see the boy dangling there, his eyes peacefully closed as he gently swayed back and forth. At first, it had been quite jarring, but Tony supposes now he’s just used to it. 

When Barnes finally does visit, they learn a lot more about the boy. He sheds light on the type of experiments and treatments he underwent to initiate mind control, but upon meeting Peter, the Winter Soldier is optimistic. His tentative diagnosis, if Tony will, is that the kid has not undergone more than a year of soldier training. From there, Tony hypothesizes that Hydra and Oscorp had been working together for the majority of Peter’s time there perfecting the cross-species genetics. After all, that seemed to be the hardest part. Hydra was pretty efficient at making psychotic super soldiers after all. 

Bucky deems it beneficial to spend time with the kid alone, which Tony hates to admit makes him uneasy. He hardly trusts the Winter Soldier to begin with, but Tony was starting to develop a comfortable pattern with the boy and he’s afraid Barnes will ruin their progress. The boy had finally started to let Tony get close to him, even so much so the pair could sit on the couch, at least five feet apart, without the kid fleeing to the ceiling.

Barnes talks to Peter for a  _ long _ time, and Tony’s left to watch it through a security camera from the comfort of his lab just down the hall from the room. And ever since, Tony starts to see more of  _ Peter _ shine through instead of the tortured boy that Hydra spit out. It’s small changes-- starting with the spark in the kid’s eyes as Tony sits with him in the room, tinkering with a faulty motherboard as he watches Peter from the corner of the eye.

Peter’s eyes are wide in wonder as he watches Tony tinker, but he doesn’t look at the boy. He knows that the slightest attention may spook the boy away, so he continues to work, whistling under his breath. Peter’s perched on the ceiling as he watches Tony work in wonder, and once the sun sets and it’s time for Tony to retire for the night, he makes sure to leave the broken motherboard on Peter’s table. 

It’s hardly dangerous-- there’s nothing that the kid could possibly make out of the shot piece of technology, but he figures if the boy is so interested in it, there’s no harm in fostering a bit of scientific exploration. Maybe this kid will take after Tony after all. However, when he returns the next morning with breakfast for Peter, the motherboard is sitting by the door. The fried edges are smoothed over and fixed, and the previously shattered North Bridge entirely repaired. He gapes at it, and he has to rub his eyes and look over the board one more time before he realizes that the kid must’ve fixed a typically deemed  _ unfixable _ motherboard. To say he is impressed is an understatement.

Before Tony knows it, three weeks have passed by. He’s sitting with Peter in his room, just as he usually does after Peter eats his dinner. Tony notices how much healthier Peter looks even after a few short weeks. Extensive research into Peter’s abilities left Tony with the conclusion that the boy probably has a potentially enhanced metabolism, so Tony has made an extensive effort to feed the kid as much as possible. The bruising around his wrists and beneath his eyes are completely faded, and if Tony didn’t know better he would’ve guessed Peter was a normal fifteen-year-old. The only dead giveaway is that Peter hardly speaks, his words carefully chosen as he stumbles over them. He’s painfully awkward in each interaction, but Tony can hardly blame a kid who’s most likely been in isolation since he was a very young child. For now, the boy’s social skills are the least of his pressing concerns.

It’s peaceful as he sits in Peter’s room, mindlessly working on his tablet as Peter sits in the top left corner of the ceiling. It’s become a comfortable routine for the two of them. Peter, unfortunately for him, had imprinted on Tony early on, so the boy found peace in Tony’s presence in the room. The billionaire is happy to oblige. They typically sit in silence, no more than a few words exchanged between them.

Today, however, Peter speaks. “Mr. Stark?”   
  
His head snaps up, his eyes roaming the ceiling until he finds where Peter is perched with his back to the wall, his feet and bent knees supporting him upright. Tony smiles at him. “Yeah, cabbage patch?”

The boy carefully climbs down from his hiding spot against the ceiling. Shyly, he walks towards the couch, flinching back with hesitation when Tony shifts to allow him some room to sit beside him. “It’s okay, bambino. Sit.” It’s the closest the kid’s come to him since he found him curled up in the cell beneath Oscorp Industries. So, he sits still and waits for Peter to come to him, however slowly that may be.

Eventually, the boy does sit beside them, a few feet separating them. Peter’s posture is tense and careful, but he cranes his neck to catch a brief glimpse of what Tony is working on with his tablet. Tony turns it in his direction so the kid can see it, but his interest is quickly lost. 

Peter twists his fingers in his lap, his forehead creased and brows knitted together as he seems to build the courage to speak. Tony’s learned that patience is the key to getting anywhere with this kid. So he sits there, scrolling through his newest suit designs on his tablet when finally, the kid spits it out.   
  
“My mission was to hurt you and Mr. Rogers,” Peter whispers, and there is so much turmoil and guilt on his face that it controls his features, pulling his lips into a harsh frown, and his forehead creases terribly. An icy, sharp rod stabs Tony in the heart, and he slowly lowers his tablet into his lap, turning his attention to Peter. “I don’t want to do that, but… sometimes at night, these dreams come and… it’s like they’re in my head all over again.” The kid’s fingers snake up the sides of his face and tangle in his curly chocolate hair. He tugs at the thick locks, and it takes all of Tony’s self-control not to intervene.   
  
“I want to be good,” the boy whimpers. “I don’t want to do this-- but they’re still  _ there _ and I’ve been trying so hard, and-”   
  


“It will take time,” Tony assures. “Do me a favor, kid?”   
  


Peter nods, staring at Tony with wide eyes. “What’s your name?” he asks. It’s a simple question, but one that all these weeks later that Peter still seems to struggle with. Tony imagines its more symbolic than anything, that Hydra took every measure necessary to beat the name out of him-- to strip him of whatever humanity and dignity he had left until he was an empty shell for them to mold. But that wasn’t Peter. Tony got him out, so now this kid can be whoever he  _ wants _ to be, and Tony wants to be around to see it. He wants to watch this kid  _ become _ Peter Parker.   
  
“I…” the boy hesitates, his eyes falling to his lap where he cracks at his knuckles and taps his fingers mindlessly on his thigh. It’s a nervous tick Tony has noticed him picking up, but if it keeps him relatively composed, Tony sees no issue with it. “My name is… Peter. Peter Parker.” There’s a subtle glint of recognition in the boy’s eyes as he says it, and Tony thinks that this is the first time that the kid says it and  _ actually _ believes it.

Tony reaches out hesitantly, to ruffle the kid’s hair lovingly. To his surprise, Peter doesn’t flinch when he rakes his fingers through the boy’s thick curls. Tony scratches the top of his head and ruffles his hair before pulling away. “You  _ are _ Peter Parker,” he affirms. “You always have been and you always will be. For now, that’s enough.”   
  
It really  _ is _ enough. While there are still so many unanswered questions, Tony’s main priority is making sure that the kid is okay. Seeing the fullness of his cheeks and the small sparks of life returning to his eyes, for now, is more than enough. Whatever happens down the road with Ross, S.H.I.E.L.D, Hydra,  _ or _ Oscorp, Tony can deal with it. Because Peter is Peter again, and that was the first step.

**Author's Note:**

> This is my contribution to the Friendly Neighborhood Fic Exchange!! I am SO excited to be sharing this. I went WAY overboard, and I had so many ideas for this that I ended up not being able to fit in this limited amount of time. While this story can stand alone as a single piece, I plan to add more to this in the future, so if you enjoy please stay tuned!!


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